


hackmesser

by okayantigone



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 08:18:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13290849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okayantigone/pseuds/okayantigone
Summary: neil and riko in the nest, during christmas. an introspection on the life of a moriyama secondborn.“i sat there, and i waited for your father to come. i spent every single day years, and years of endless days like this, waiting, for nathan wesninski to come and kill me.”





	hackmesser

**Author's Note:**

> here's another riko introspective angsty deathfic happy 2018, im back on my bullshit

“i used to think about you, you know,” riko says. his voice is mild, quiet and unexpected in the darkness of their room. the only light comes from the dimmed desk lamp. Riko is balancing on the chair, unscrewing the smoke detector. he jams one of his tattoo needles into it, and twists it until the light stops winking at them. 

he steps down, satisfied, and takes a seat back at his own bed, knees pulled up, his back flat against the wall. 

“oh?” 

it’s about what neil can manage. the pain from the last beating he endured has mostly faded now, but he’s tired. riko will have his evening smoke, luxuriate in the shower, screw the smoke detector back on, and go to bed. 

“yes,” riko says languidly. “i did. we used to talk about you, me and kevin. sometimes. little nathaniel wesninski who got away from it all.” 

he lights his cigarette with shaking fingers, and takes a deep drag. only so close to him, in the confines of this room, neil sees the sickness spreading. it is everywhere. riko has been dead for so long, leaving rot where he goes. maybe that’s why kevin still doesn’t have it in him to hate him. maybe he has figured out long ago, what only now is catching up to him. 

“yeah?” he props himself on his elbow to get a better look at riko in the dark. he wonders why no one else seems to notice that he is starving, the hollows of his face carved brutally by a diet regime and daily purging. 

riko blows out clouds of smoke. 

“we’d imagine it…. all the places you’d gone. maybe you and your mom were on a ferry to venice, and you’d live in a beautiful house on the water. or you were farmers in switzerland. did you ever go to switzerland? i don’t remember from my list.”

there’s only three days until he leaves, and he feels indulgent. 

“we did. we were farmers too, but we did that in wisconsin.” 

“ah.” says riko simply, and takes another drag. 

“natty, and his mom. it was our fucking fairytale, you know.” he says after a while, maybe two or three cigarettes later. “we’d sit – me in this bed, and kevin where you are now, and we would just … talk about all the places you probably were… all the places we’d go when we got out of this hellhole.” 

“you,” he pointed at neil with the ember of his cigarette, “you, nathaniel fucking wesninski – you did the impossible. you got the fuck out. god, and you know what really just … really pisses me off? you got out, and then… you came back. why? why did you have to come back? you were out, natty. neil. whomever.” 

neil isn’t sure he can handle so much raw emotion in riko’s voice. he isn’t sure he can handle anything from him but violence. 

“you know why.” he says quietly. “and you’d have come back too.” 

“for exy?” riko shakes his head. “you have it the wrong way around, junior. you’d have to chop my legs off to keep me from running, if i’d ever got out of this place alive. and your father would have too, if they’d ordered him.” 

neil watches him put out the cigarette methodically, as he has all the nights he’s been conscious enough. he licks the inside of his wrist, and then stubs it out on the skin. there were a few neat little scars from where the trick hadn’t quite worked, but his usual tailored suits and exy gear had always covered them from the media’s hungry eye. 

he clicks his lighter, and small fire illuminates his face in its brittle unhealthy glow. his eyes look like black holes, large and empty. like a glitch. like a shaky sketch in a horror comic. 

he brings another cigarette to his lips, looking at neil the whole time, but neil has the distinct impression he isn’t being seen. 

“we aren’t that different, you and i,” he says finally. his voice has an exhausted, final quality to it, as though he’s just made his mind up about something. 

“oh,” says neil, with all the energy he can muster, “fuck you.” 

it isn’t a lot of energy. riko’s pretty depleted too, because all he does is lob an exy ball from the desk at him, and even though it makes contact with neil’s shoulder, it’s by far, neither the most painful thing he’s endured from riko, nor the worst thing he’s endured today. 

“i used to,” riko licks his lips, and sucks in another breath of smoke. neil is getting the feeling that this is something he has gathered the strength to say, and when he does, maybe finally the missing piece from the puzzle will click, and neil will understand something important, and this whole goddamn mess will unravel. 

“i used to sit here. where you’re sitting now, in kevin’s bed. he’d be at – at tutoring, or whatever. and i would sit in this bed, the way you are now, bruises and all, and i would wait. every day, for the last ten years, and for all my years before that, when i lived in this dormitory. i would sit in this bed, after i’d been drilled and beaten on the court, and i would stare at that wall, and i would wait. do you know, what i was waiting for, nathaniel?” 

he takes another breath from his cigarette, sucking it down to the filter, plunging the room in darkness.  
neil knows. has always known, ever since kevin’s first horrible explanation. 

“i sat there, and i waited for your father to come. i spent… every single day… years, and years of endless days like this, waiting, for nathan wesninski to come and kill me.”

neil remains silent, with nothing to say. his father was the moriyama’s butcher. and had riko become expendable, he would have been the one to end it. rationally, he had known that. kevin had explained it to him, how it all worked, all the bloody terrible business that kept the ravens at the top. 

he imagines riko, only a few years older than him, sitting after the master’s caning, and wondering if this was the final failure that would bring his end. imagining natty and mom in a sunny faraway place. 

it is the most sympathy he has ever felt for riko, not in the present, but rather this abstract, younger, child-riko, who even now, sits in the same rotten dungeon, waiting for the day someone finally puts him out of his misery and puts a bullet in his head. 

he can hear him shuffling around the room, an expert of disappearing himself into the shadows. 

“you’ve always known, haven’t you?” neil asked, finally. “that you’d never get out of here alive.” 

he hears riko take in a breath to answer. he wonders if riko knows how to breathe when no one is looking at him. he wonders if riko knows how to exist when no one is looking at him. does he simpl disappear into the dark, when neil can’t make his shape out in the pitch black of the room, only materializing when his name is called? 

“i did.” he says quietly. “and then kevin ran away.” 

“you’ll never forgive him, will you? for leaving you behind?” neil goads. he isn’t sure what he’s trying to get. his father will kill them both one day, and in that sense they are equals, although neil’s end is coming a lot sooner. 

he can hear riko shuffling into bed, under the blankets. he can imagine his wide dark eyes, brimming with sick curiosity peering at him. if they both reach out at the same time, their hands will touch. 

“you know i can’t. would you?” 

no, neil thinks. has always thought. kevin-the-coward. he would never have forgiven him. he would have hunted him down, and killed him. there is too much mercy in riko for that. if mercy is the word. they have a different language for vengeance, but maybe that can be attributed to a difference in upbringing. the long game, marked by small victories of instant gratification paves the way for those, living their lives awaiting the butcher’s knife. same concept, different executions.  
riko seems to take neil’s silence for disagreement, because he presses on. 

“i didn’t have a mother to protect me,” his voice is almost a whisper. “it was me, and kevin against the world. what would you do, if your mother had left you behind?”

“and who protected kevin from you?” neil fires back. he thinks he may have won this one, but then the riko machine turns back on, as he inhales slowly. 

“who protected you from your mother?” 

but there is no victory in his voice. neil gives him the point in his mental scoreboard anyway. no one. no one protects you. and in the end, he had failed to protect her in return. 

he dreams of using riko’s lighter to set fire to a funeral pyre of exy sticks, where his mother is still alive.

**Author's Note:**

> the title means cleaver knife in german
> 
> edit: please don't start your comments off with how much you hate riko. if you really can't get over how much you hate him to leave me a review that doesn't make me feel like shit for writing about a character i enjoy, then please don't comment at all. getting those types of reviews always makes me feel like i've done something wrong by writing my fanfic.


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